Rallying CCNY
President Gregory Williams has lived on both sides of the color line, and now he’s using his experience to connect with his students and turn around his university.
By Jamal Watson
When Dr. Gregory H. Williams left The Ohio State University in August 2001 to become president of the City College of New York, many of his colleagues in the academy were convinced that Williams — who was dean of OSU’s law school — had lost his mind.
At the time, City College — the flagship school of The City University of New York system — was mired in deep financial problems and was facing a declining enrollment. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred just six weeks after Williams took the job, and he found himself forced to rally thousands of devastated students and faculty.
It seemed almost too much for one person to take on.
But Williams was used to challenges. In 1954, at the age of 10, he moved with his family from segregated Virginia, where he grew up believing he was White, to Muncie, Ind., where he learned his father’s family was Black.
It was on a Greyhound bus that Williams and his brother would learn the news. His White mother had deserted them, and his father, James “Buster” Williams, had been keeping a startling secret that he could no longer hide: He was a light-skinned Black man who was “passing” for White.
"Life is going to be different from now on,” Williams’ father told them as they made the journey to Indiana. “In Virginia you were White boys,” but “in Indiana you’re going to be colored.”
The news left Williams bewildered. Back in Virginia, he had attended Whites-only schools and frequented swimming pools that were off-limits to Blacks. When he began to self-identify as Black in Muncie, even though he could’ve easily passed as White, he was subjected to all forms of racism.
“I hadn’t wanted to be colored, but too much had happened to me in Muncie to be a part of the White world that had rejected me so completely,” Williams says.
